The release of SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5.1.1 has opened the door wider to integrations made possible by Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC).

In a nutshell, you could improve the response time to resolve incidents and reduce the costs of problem support by being able to view data -- while in SCCD -- on your assets and configuration items from other IT products such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring and IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager. Or by monitoring events on your configuration items from IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus. In real-time. Without having to switch tools. Without importing the data into SmartCloud Control Desk.

The SmartCloud Control Desk wiki contains the following pages that explain details on the value of each integration, answer the question "Just what is OSLC anyway?", and provide links to details on requirements and configuration steps.

Hi Everyone,Welcome to Useful Tiny Little Things, a series of topics that I will publish in the Process Automation blog.

This time I've created a wiki page, since this topic is a little too big for a blog post, but in the following I'll show how you can modify some properties on SmartCloud Control Desk to enable or disable parts of the User Interface and as well how to add new actions (buttons) to you toolbar and Navigation Bar. Hope you enjoy

My name is Leandro Cassa and I work at IBM on the Mobile development division, but in the past I've been working as level 3 leader, scrum master and product developer for IBM Tivoli SmartCloud Control Desk. The purpose of this series is to provide useful simple things that we sometimes have no idea exist. These tips apply to SmartCloud Control Desk, and other products based on Tivoli Process Automation Engine (TPAE).

The Change Management process in SmartCloud Control Desk contains many workflow task assignments. Workflow tasks are a handy way to assign work to someone or to get their approval. However, sometimes a task is assigned to the wrong person, or the owner of an urgent task is out of the office. In these situations, the task needs to be assigned to someone else so things can move forward. This new wiki article shows how easy it is to reassign a workflow task.

To implement some conditional user interface use cases, SmartCloud Control Desk 7.x allows you to conditionally change the property values of your widgets. This is controlled in the Application Designer application by launching the “Configure Conditional Properties” window available under the Advanced tab of the Control Properties window for each control.

For a full list of properties that can be controlled by Conditional UI, please read this wiki article.

Are you a Developer who configures SmartCloud Control Desk or other process automation engine products to meet your business requirements? Have you wanted to talk to the team members behind the Application Designer and the User Interface framework to ask the best way to configure the user interface?

If so please attend an hour-long session on Thursday May 16th @ 8:00 AM CST and bring your questions. If we have a large number of attendees, we will probably mute the phone conference lines and take questions in the text chat area and respond to them.

Submit your questions here so they can be up or down voted and the most urgent ones can be addressed. Our Maximo and Process Automation Developer Forum located here is also a source of great information sharing between our Developers, so you might search ahead of time there for an answer before bringing it to the session.

Many new User Interface features have
been introduced as part of the SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5.1 release to improve usability. This document contains detailed instructions on how to configure each of the new features.This document only covers the features that are new to the SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5.1 release. Please refer to this
blog entry to understand all the User Interface features that were introduced
in SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5.

Application Developers:

There are some great new application-level features available to help
improve the usability of your applications. If
you are a SmartCloud Control Desk or Tivoli process automation engine application developer you might choose to add some
of these new features to the applications that you manage for your
users. Many of the out-of-the-box SmartCloud Control Desk
applications have already been extended to use these new features, but
you'll need to add them to your own custom applications.

System Administrators:There are a set of system-level user interface enhancements that apply to all applications. System administrators upgrading from SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5 to 7.5.1 will have to manually enable most of these new system-level features after their upgrade process is finished. You need to make sure that your end users are ready for these changes to the look and feel of their product, and you might need to create some education material about the new capabilities of the user interface before turning on these new features in your SmartCloud Control Desk system.

Another IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Process Content Package hit the street this past week - IT Hardware Asset Management. This is the third package from the Tivoli Advanced Technology Group in the past five months.

These packages of content can be used with SmartCloud Control Desk to accelerate implementation and get you into production quickly. They use prescriptive methods based on ITIL and Best Practices. Instead of weeks or months, this content gets Control Desk operational in just a few days.

Tired of spread sheets, scrolling through hundreds, if not thousands of rows for the right asset? How are you calculating dates for a refresh or disposal on all those hardware assets?

What about the management of this inventory, from Receipt to Disposal, and who is responsible for each step? Once an asset is being used, how do you assure when it gets moved, it's to the right location for the right person?

Those challenges and many others, no doubt, are the work life of a Hardware Asset Manager. So let's take a look at what this new pack will do for you.

First off, the day-to-day IMAC process - the typical work of Installation, Move, Add or Change - this pack has it covered. There are start centers and queries to automate those activities which often are the bulk of Hardware Asset management process. That is the goal - automate the simple so the complex can be managed effectively.

Classifications have been created for all your IT Hardware following the UNSPSC structure which allow for easy asset searches. If you know what you are looking for, word searches get you directly to that asset.

But what good are start centers or classifications if there are no assets loaded into SmartCloud Control Desk? You need to get your assets into Control Desk first, before using the full functionality of IT Asset Management. You can do that through a couple of different ways:

Use your Discovery tools and load the assets through the adapter as Discovered Assets, then move them into the Authorized category when appropriate.

If you have a CSV flat file of your asset inventory, use the Quick Configuration function to load them into Control Desk.

There, now you have the visibility you need into all your assets.

How does using this pack help?

Inventory store rooms and work job plans allow IMAC to proceed with full confidence every asset is under control.

The utilization of assets can now be reviewed and purchasing decisions made with full knowledge of your needs, not just a guess.

Standard reports, the ultimate method in knowing what assets you have and their status, are in this content package. Each provides insight on assets which have been potentially lost, and certainly renewed or permanently disposed--every step a factor in the asset life cycle and procurement decision making.

I posted the following information in the Asset Management blog. I'm re-posting it here as it applies to Process Automation users of SmartCloud Control Desk as well.

Do you remember that movie Multiplicity
where Michael Keaton clones himself to become more productive? A
similar approach can be followed when using SCCD 7.5: if you want to
perform work in parallel to become more productive, you can launch
multiple browser tabs or windows as the same user. However, there are some limitations that you need to learn before attempting concurrent sessions.

“Who moved my cheese?” If you are a Maximo Asset Management or Industry Solutions customer who has added SmartCloud Control Desk to their environment, you might feel like that cheese-less mouse. Many global changes were made to the user interface by SmartCloud Control Desk during its installation. For instance, there’s now a Navigation bar on the left side of the User Interface. All of these global changes can be reversed by updating the system properties of your Maximo Asset Management server.

Here is a document that describes all of the new user interface changes and how to control them, so you can decide whether to keep them or revert to your previous look and feel. You will change these properties in the System Configuration->Platform Configuration->System Properties. You can perform a Live Refresh after you update these values (it will not require a server restart), but you will need to logout and log back in before you will see your updates take effect.

Introduction

It is recommended, as part of the upgrade process, that the latest fixpack available is applied. The regular process requires two steps in order to achieve this. First step would be to do the actual upgrade. For example, applying SCCD 7.5 on top of SRM 7.2.1.4. Stop two would be to apply the latest fixpack available for the new version. For example, applying SCCD 7.5.0.1 on top of SCCD 7.5.

Objective

The objective of this tutorial is to provide simple steps to upgrade and apply the latest Fixpack on a single change window.

This tutorial applies primarily to ISM Family products, such as, SRM, CCMDB and TAMIT on their 7.2.X versions. The upgrade target is SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5 (SCCD 7.5). The latest SCCD fixpack available at the time this tutorial was written is SCCD 7.5.0.1. Please check Fixcentral to get the latest fixpack version available.

Prerequisites

Tutorial Steps

Proceed through the install panels as usual and providing all required information

When the following panel is reached (see Figure 1), check the options "Deploy application files manually later" and "Defer the Update of the Maximo Database"

Figure 1

***Please note that if the installer detects certain content in your installation, it may not display these options. In that case you must execute the Content Installer. Then you will be presented with these options.***

The installer should exit successfully with no error messages. Note that neither the application has been deployed nor the database has been updated.

Now proceed to the Fixpack installation.

Once the same panel is reached (see Figure 1), do not check any options.

The install should now deploy the application and update the database successfully.

[Tutorials] How to set up a horizontal cluster for a Maximo sandbox using WebSphere Application Server 7

Introduction

As described in WebSphere Application Server Information Center: “Clusters are groups of servers that are managed together and participate in workload management. A cluster can contain nodes or individual application servers. Clusters are responsible for balancing workload among servers. Servers that are a part of a cluster are called cluster members. When you install an application on a cluster, the application is automatically installed on each cluster member. You can configure a cluster to provide workload balancing with service integration or with message driven beans in the application server.”

There are two types of clustering: horizontal and vertical. Both of them can be configured in different ways. This document is a guide that shows the easiest version of a horizontal cluster for a Maximo sandbox using WebSphere Application Server 7 (WAS).

Benefits of a horizontal cluster environment:

High availability;

Load balance;

Performance improvement.

Pre-requirements

This tutorial is based on WebSphere Application Server 7 and Maximo 7.5. Some specifics steps may differ from version to version, but the overall process is the same.

The user required to execute this tutorial must have administrative privileges in WAS to create nodes, clusters, start and stop servers, among other things.

To simplify the configuration of the horizontal cluster provided by this guide, no directory information services (LDAP), such as IBM Tivoli Directory Server or Microsoft Active Directory, were installed or configured.

It is also necessary to have at least two machines for the horizontal cluster. One of them must have Maximo successfully deployed. The other must have only an Application Server installed, with no Deployment Manager (DM). In order to improve performance of your environment, you may install the database or deployment management in separate machines.

The standalone Application Server that you want to federate must be up and running before starting this guide.

After executing this guide, you should have a horizontal cluster environment similar to the image below:

Note:This guide requires readers to
have basic WAS and Maximo platform knowledge.

Adding a node

1. Login to the WAS admin console as wasadmin (Maximo server / WAS with DM).

2. Navigate to System administration > Nodes.

3. Click Add Node.

4. Select Managed Node.

5. Click Next.

6. On the next page, provide all the information about the Node you want to federate:

7. Click OK.

8. On the next page, it will give an option to run the node as a Windows Service. Do not select this option and click OK.

9. The creation node process will start and the logs will be displayed.

10. Once the process has finished, you should see two nodes: one from cell 1 and another for cell 2 that you have just added.

11. If the nodes are not synchronized, select nodes 1 and 2 and click Synchronize.

12. At this point, you will no longer be able to login to WAS from cell 2 since it is now managed by the Deployment Manager.

The IT Service Management discipline is mature and is under pressure from lines of business to change and become more flexible in how it measures and manages business services. IT business services themselves are changing to include all types of technology, IT and non IT equipment. Companies today, are needing to move beyond the normal IT boundaries to enhance business services with smarter devices, telco and transportation devices. Another huge change is that a lot more non-IT personnel now need to interact with the IT environment. Without the flexibility to adopt to these new pressures, IT executives will not be able to respond to business demands quickly and more importantly in a manner that is non-disruptive and cost effective. The days of multiple product solutions, that work only in traditional IT environments are over. This presentation will cover these changes and discuss how to efficiently address these problems

Speakers

After 23 years working for the UK government, moving from forestry to IT Service Management via prisons, stores and training, Ivor now works for IBM’s Tivoli organization helping customers understand and improve their Service Management. He was an ITIL author (versions 1, 2 and 3), part of the panel that wrote BS15000 (fast-tracked to ISO/IEC 20000), an ITIL trainer and examiner since 1991 and active in itSMF since 1995, having spoken for them in 34 countries. Never frightened to express his own opinions, you can find his blogs here

Christopher Dittmer is the Program Director in IBM Software Group focused on strategy and product management for IT asset and service management solutions. Prior to joining IBM Software Group, Chris was focused on internal corporate strategy for IBM. His prior experience also includes operational planning for the federal government, project management in financial services, technology consulting for large manufacturing firms, and the management of a technology startup. Chris holds an undergraduate degree from Washington University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

The IBM business architecture team will be presenting on a series of training sessions intended to help our clients plan their upgrade to the latest versions of Maximo Asset Management and SmartCloud Control Desk. The bulk of this series will be devoted to the Maximo product suite, add-on's and industry solutions.

The series will run July to October on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Ample time will be allowed for client questions and sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend the live events. Details about this series can be found here.